enough to go by

Climbing last night: exhausting, an overhang I couldn't overcome until the nth try, not to mention a corner chimney route I couldn't quite dislocate my hips enough to finish; I left the gym quite happy actually. Dinner last night: romaine lettuce and pita chips. Had chicken and pasta ready to go but body denied both; body really, really wanted the lettuce. Body is generally quiet enough about food preferences (apart from "chocolate? ooo! more chocolate?") that I've learned to listen when it has an opinion.

I find the smell of boiling romaine to be wonderfully reassuring. Grandma made it for my sister and me, either fifteen or seventeen years ago when one or the other of my brothers was being born and Mom was away from home. Grandma (this is Dad's mother; Mom's mother isn't much for the kitchen) had precisely one method of preparing vegetables: boil 'em up in soup (normally chicken bouillon). Serve on rice.

It's really tasty.

I'm progressing very slowly with St Augustine; over the past week or two I've been continually distracted by Neal Stephenson and I haven't even started Douglas Adams yet. Not to mention I've still got Dorothy Dunnett, who more or less fell by the wayside pre-November. But when I did bother to pick up St A again, I found him busily appealing to the angsty teenager in all of us.

( rambling on St Augustine's teen angst, cut to spare the uninterested )